News

Realm Upgrades Database-Centric Mobile Dev Platform

• By David Ramel
• October 18, 2017

Realm has updated its mobile app development platform, adding a studio tool that gives developers new insights into stored data and interactions with that data, among other new features.

Realm Platform 2.0 expands upon the mobile platform -- with an Object Server and back-end services -- the company built up around its original offering, a popular client-side database that runs on iOS and Android devices. The company claims the three-year-old, real-time distributed Realm Mobile Database is the most popular third-party offering of its kind, with more than 3.5 billion installations.

The update includes Realm Studio, a free tool for all users of the Realm Database, which comes in a no-cost, open source edition along with for-pay plans.

The company said it "provides developers with a window into the data stored in Realm that powers the mobile app, and a comprehensive understanding for how the in-app Realm Database is interacting with the Realm Object Server to deliver real-time mobile experiences."

Realm said the Studio tool displays the status of a Realm Object Server, showing information such as active network connections and traffic volume, in addition to letting developers explore and interact with Realm implementations in realtime, such as viewing and debugging .realm files in apps.

Also new is the ability to install and configure the platform via the popular npm package manager originally developed for the Node.js ecosystem. The npm support is designed to ease the installation of the platform on the major Linux variants, Mac OS, Windows and other platforms.

Also, a new authentication system is featured, along with stability, usability and performance improvements, and bug fixes.

"With mobile devices becoming the primary computing device for consumers and workers, a new stack is required that will make it easy for developers to build full-featured mobile apps that deliver a phenomenal user experience," said Alexander Stigsen, co-founder and CEO. "We believe that the Realm Platform is a fundamentally important part of this new stack, and the new features in 2.0 are in line with our goal of becoming the data layer for the next Internet."